Synthesis of Mesoporous Nickel Phosphate with Long Hollow Nanotubes

Abstract

Mesostructured nickel phosphate was synthesized with urea as alkali by sol-gel method. The obtained material nominated as NiPO-3 was characterized by means of XRD, ICP, FT-IR, TEM, and N2 adsorption. In contrast to mesoporous nickel phosphate NiPO-1 and NiPO-2 we reported before, NiPO-3 exhibits relatively longer nanotubes reached up to 400~600 nm. N2 adsorption shows that NiPO-3 possesses high BET surface area (345.8 m2g-1) and pore volume (0.46 cm3g-1). The catalytic performance of NiPO-3 showed that the total selectivity of epoxycyclohexane and hexadienol was as high as 83.38%.